1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the recording and reading of files on a sequential medium including recording or reading of a management information area storing data structures that are used for volume and file management and recording or reading files onto the volume. Furthermore, the invention relates to a sequential medium comprising such a management information area and a volume containing files.
2. Description of the Related Art
Known optical digital video recording discs consist of a lead-in area, a data area and a lead-out area. A drive presents the data area to the file system. In general, a file system uses part of the data area for its own administration purposes and presents the remainder in some suitable way, using partitions, as a so-called logical volume, i.e., a logical contiguous address space to an application. Typically, a file system uses an anchor descriptor at so-called anchor points to find a reference to its management information area for volume structure.
JAFS (Joint Approach File System) is a volume and file management system intended to be used for both AV (Audio and Video) and computer applications. Most of the existing volume and file management systems are designed to be used only for computer applications, and as such, they lack the functions necessary for AV applications, such as real-time data reading and writing, or file dividing and combining without data movement. JAFS is designed to enable implementation of the above and other functions useful for AV applications in an effective manner.
The JAFS file system is defined for a randomly rewritable medium. Due to this definition, problems occur when using a sequential write-once medium.